Other View: On surveillance, 'trust us' doesn't cut it

National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander testifies Tuesday before the House Select Intelligence Committee on the NSA's PRISM program, which tracks web traffic and US citizens' phone records.

Less than two weeks after news broke that the government has been secretly seizing millions of phone and Internet records, polls show about half of the public approves of the vacuum-cleaner approach to keeping them safe from terrorism. Last week's House hearing on the National Security Agency programs did nothing to disturb that foolishly compliant attitude.

The witness list was stacked in favor of the administration. The questioning was mostly friendly. NSA Director Keith Alexander testified that the data had helped break up more than 50 plots, including bombings of the New York Stock Exchange and the city's subways. Courts, Congress and a gaggle of self-imposed restrictions protect privacy and civil liberties, other witnesses assured.

The message was clear: Nothing to worry about here. Trust us.

So what's not to like? The lessons of history. As Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn, said, "We know that when a capability exists, there's a potential for abuse." Safeguards like those in place today have repeatedly been overridden and promises like today's abandoned.

Flash back to programs created to deal with the "Red Menace" of the 1940s and '50s. The rising threat of communism spurred the intelligence agencies to collect telegrams sent overseas by foreign embassies - a twist on an old form of spying. Telecom companies of the day acquiesced in what was known as Project Shamrock. Then, in 1956, the FBI initiated a program called Cointelpro - for Counterintelligence Program - to disrupt Communist Party activities in the United States.

But by the 1960s, the programs had turned into lawless dragnets. The NSA was sucking up 150,000 telegrams a month, the vast majority of them sent by law-abiding Americans. Data were being traded among agencies. Meanwhile, the FBI was building dossiers on anyone that Director J. Edgar Hoover found suspicious, most notably Martin Luther King Jr. President Nixon created an enemies list and attempted to use the CIA to cover up the Watergate break-in.

Those abuses rocked the country in the mid-1970s when a Senate inquiry uncovered them. Congress created a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to prevent future abuses in the name of security.

Now, however, with the confluence of a terrorist threat and the existence of a once unimaginable array of computerized data, the country might need new protections, and complacency, particularly in Congress, is not the way to get them. It should gin up a robust debate, not gentle pats on the back and softball questions of the sort on display Tuesday.

President Obama focused on what's not being collected without court orders - the contents of phone calls and the e-mails of U.S. citizens. That underplays how much can be learned from the details that are vacuumed up: numbers called, duration of calls and when the calls are made. Every parent on a family cellphone plan knows you can keep tabs on the kids simply by scanning the monthly bill.

Then, administration officials underscored the protections in place. For instance, phone records are deleted after five years, according to testimony. That's comforting, up to a point. But it is a policy, not a law. Future presidents can change it; future bureaucrats can ignore it; future scoundrels can use the records to dig up dirt on political opponents or even straying spouses.

No doubt, stopping terrorism requires tradeoffs. But it's not yet clear whether the foiled plots required the level of intrusiveness that's now routine. If history shows anything, it's that once government has the power to sweep up data, the power is used, and often abused.

- USA TODAY

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Other View: On surveillance, 'trust us' doesn't cut it

Less than two weeks after news broke that the government has been secretly seizing millions of phone and Internet records, polls show about half of the public approves of the vacuum-cleaner approach

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